Final Conference (17th February)
24 February 2022
NEXTGEAR Final Conference was held on Thursday, 17th February through Teams app due to Covid-19’s limitation to organize physical events. The event gathered 50 participants, including project consortium members, Europe’s Rail JU representatives, stakeholders from the rail industry, PIVOT-2 complementary project members and various research centers representatives .
Philippe Citroën Director General of UNIFE welcome all the participants to the event, congratulated the consortium for the extraordinary work done and remarked the promising results of the project which will contribute to the future evolution of the Next Generation Running Gears. He also expressed the consortium desire of continuing its activity in the future Europe’s Rail Programme. Javier Ibañez NEXTGEAR project officer continued with the opening remarks highlighting the good collaboration and alignment stablished between the project and Shift2Rail JU, in particular with PIVOT-2 complementary project.
During the first part of the event the overall picture of the project was presented to the audience; Jose Bertolin NEXTGEAR Project Coordinator focused on the high level project presentation while Sebastian Stichel NEXTGEAR Technical Leader presented the technical perspective of the project, its main results and achievements.
The rest of the session until the coffee break was dedicated to present the activity of the technical work package related to the high-end solutions to the development of running gear innovations. The leader of the WP Simon Iwnicki introduce main innovations and results while tasks leaders presented in more detailed the performed innovation in their specific areas; Ali Gokhan Demir Additive Manufacturing, Per Wennhage Composite Materials and Andrea del Sole Development of state-of-the-art Controller Technologies.
After the coffee break when a video of the project results were broadcasted (available at web’s section Results&Publications/Video), the second part of the event started with the presentation of the Wheelset of the future by Stefano Bruni dedicated to explain the activity performed with regards the use of the hybrid metallic-composite material for the development of the wheelset, in particular the axle of the wheels. The technical presentations finished with the Universal Cost Model 2.0 presentation, Carlos Casanueva leader of the WP and Yann Bezin and Andrew Smith tasks leaders presented the new version of the tool and their improvements in the computation of the innovations benefits.
The slides presented at the conference can be downloaded here.
The event ended with the closing remarks from Sebastian Stichel and Jose Bertolin. The Final Conference video is available in the website.